Fusion-io board gets ex-HP hotshot

Shane Robison, the ex-HP chief technology officer, has joined the board of server flash seller Fusion-io.

Robison, age 58, parted company with HP at the beginning of November, shortly after Meg Whitman replaced Leo Apotheker as HP's CEO. He will serve on the Fusion-io board's Audit Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, but his role is broader than that.

Fusion-io's chairman and CEO, David Flynn, said: "Shane … in addition to helping us to refine our cloud and R&D strategies … will help us deepen our relationships with server systems vendors and other technology leaders."

Fusion's PCIe flash relies on controller software in a host server's operating system and comes with additional software, VSL and ioTurbine for example, making it another tier of memory below a server's DRAM. Other PCIe flash vendors sell hardware with built-in flash controller functionality, more of an appliance approach in a way.

Fusion thinks that PCIe flash hardware will become a commodity and that its longer-term value resides in the software interfacing to it and managing it. ®